I have always been confounded by the ubiquity of the “friday night goals” meme among my millennial cohort, the instagram story picture of a single glass of red wine and the opening of Ozark on a flat screen on an Ikea entertainment console with the caption “Things Getting Crazy Over Here” or something similarly fucking hilarious. I’m confounded not by the false assumption of the meme, that outside the apartment window is mostly everyone else doing rails and getting laid, but by the sheer popularity of the concept, because choosing to reward yourself for a week of being insanely bored with the gift of a hugely boring night seems insane to me.
It’s not that I don’t see the appeal in isolation - in fact I have always been attracted to tales of hermits. I understand rejecting society, finding peace, meaning, and purpose in isolation, or at the very least a different way of living. I do not understand choosing to live in society and then rejecting the only good things society has to offer, namely getting blackout drunk with your three best friends named Derek at Dave & Busters.
I was telling my therapist about how I’ve always looked to stories of hermits as if they’d figured something out - that they found out how to do the one thing I find most terrifying and impossible: being alone and bored, and not scared of that.
Do you know the story of the hermit they found living in central Maine back in 2014? There had been robberies happening to summer homes for decades - nothing valuable, just food, tools, some bedding. Books sometimes, he stole somebody’s copy of Ulysses once. One day they catch the guy. He tells the cops he lives in the woods and they ask, ‘for how long?’:
Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years; this was just a news event he happened to remember. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. He was now 47, a middle-aged man.
Knight stated that over all those years he slept only in a tent. He never lit a fire, for fear that smoke would give his camp away. He moved strictly at night. He said he didn’t know if his parents were alive or dead. He’d not made one phone call or driven in a car or spent any money. He had never in his life sent an e-mail or even seen the Internet.
Why? Sometime of these cases there’s a trigger on record, but they always seem underwhelming as catalysts for a retreat to the woods: the Buddha and the poor man, Paul of Thebes losing his parents, Alexander Supertramp and his dad’s infidelity. More often they’re like the Maine hermit or the unabomber: outsider personalities who end up living the way they’ve always felt.
More fascinating even for me is people who hermit in plain sight, the Miss Havishams of history. I recently read about Stephen Tennant, a central figure in the Bright Young Things of 1920s England, whose journey from flamboyant extroversion to paranoid self-seclusion is nearly Greek in scale.
Here’s what my dude was up to as a teenager in the 1910s:
If Pamela took a keen interest in her precocious adolescent’s artistic promise, she paid little attention to his reckless behavior, such as his habit of offering local soldiers a cigarette in exchange for a kiss. Once, when an encounter went further than a kiss, he was apprehended and brought home by a policeman, who assumed the boy would face consequences. He was mistaken. Sir Edward had recently died, and it never occurred to Pamela that Steenie, as he was known, should be anything but his uninhibited self. Tennant’s gift for high camp, cultivated as least partly as camouflage for shyness, was always displayed at heroic levels. On one visit to New York, he disembarked the ship in full makeup, his hair in marcel waves, with a bunch of orchids in his hand. “Pin ‘em on!” jeered a customs officer, to which Tennant responded: “Oh, have you got a pin? What a wonderful welcome … you kind, kind creature.” John Waters, who in 2015 named Philip Hoare’s excellent biography of Tennant as one of his ten favorite books, put it thusly: “Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch—believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.”
He was practically worshipped among the artistic and gay cohorts of the upper class for much of the pre-war years, but one great love affair with the poet Siegfried Sassoon ended after years of self-inflicted torment with Tennant cutting off all contact with Sassoon and, eventually, the world outside his lavish home. From his seclusion, Tennant wrote volumes of letters to friends and fans, many of them longing for the man he pushed away, pain itself seeming to be the ultimate decadence.
What’s to be learned from any of this? Choosing to isolate is a kind of grand performance art, in that the isolation will always take place in the context of a world dominated by connections, by a decided lack of isolation. Nothing is not connected, no one man is an island: the Maine hermit stole to eat, Supertramp lived (and died) off the knowledge of previous survivalists, and Tennant’s luxurious prison was built on the proceeds of a bleach powder empire. Can you ever really do anything on your own? When you stay in Friday night, are you opting out, or just getting ready to give more tomorrow?
P.S. - An aside I can’t pass up, the hermit article is written by Michael Finkel, the author first famous for fabricating a story about child slavery in Africa, and later much more famous for when a mass murderer assumed Finkel’s identity while on the run in Mexico. They made a movie about it with Jonah Hill and James Franco, and it unfortunately sucks dick.